film festivals
Demetrios Matheou
Turin, December 2013. Berlusconi has finally been kicked out of the Italian parliament. The country is disaffected, fed up with its politicians, broke. Youngsters, including university students, have no hope for the future. It’s a perfect time for them to become acquainted with New Hollywood cinema.One of the most appealing aspects of the Turin Film Festival is the quality of its retrospectives, which are astutely chosen, intelligently curated and extensive. A Nicholas Ray retrospective in 2009 was revelatory, and helped point the way to the rediscovery (and full restoration) of his long-lost Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
One might think that of all the national cinemas, the one that least needs its own festival in the UK is the French; after all, Gallic fare has a better showing here than most foreign language films.That said, distribution-wise it’s a large slice of a tiny pie. And with 30 new films, the 21st edition of the French Film Festival offers a glimpse of the breadth of French cinema that isn’t always apparent from general releases. For Francophiles in London, Warwick and a handful of Scottish cities, the next month promises quite a boon.The festival opens with the first live action film by Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, of Amélie fame, makes so few films that whenever he pulls one out of that magic hat of his it feels like an event. At least it used to. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, which has just had its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, is a lovingly made and sweet film; but the novelty of the director’s style – that minutely observed production design and full-blown whimsy – has now completely worn off, leaving one wishing for a new dimension.The 10-year-old protagonist, who might also be described as gifted, precocious and brimming with initiative, Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The careers of writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell are indelibly linked, with a collaboration that has now lasted 20 years. In 1993 Michell, then an accomplished theatre director who was relatively new to the camera, directed Kureishi’s adaptation of his novel The Buddha of Suburbia for the BBC, with great success. After a nine-year gap – and Michell’s phenomenal hit with Notting Hill – they rekindled their relationship for the big screen, with Michell directing Kureishi’s original screenplays for The Mother (2003), Venus (2006) and now, their third film together, Le Week- Read more ...
james.woodall
Feuchtgebiete has been the talk of Locarno. The word combines “damp” or “moist” with “areas” – yes, you might guess what’s coming. English-born, German-bred Charlotte Roche published in 2008 a novel of the same title, which became Wetlands in English. And as my mother’s reprimand of me and my brothers sniggering at what boys always snigger at went, “Will you please get your heads out of your pants…”The pants here are Helen’s (Carla Juri). She’s a hyper-imaginative teenager who can’t keep her mind off her fanny. She has bad haemorrhoids – don’t we just know that at the film’s start as she Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Cannes, that irresistible feeding frenzy of film, is just around the corner. But 6,000 miles away in Panama City a film festival has just concluded that, for entirely different reasons, is equally significant. Panama isn’t known for its film output – it's made just one fiction feature in more than 60 years – and while America may have relinquished its control of the canal, the grip of its cultural colonialism has proven much more difficult to loosen.That’s why, in just its second year, the Festival Internacional de Cine de Panama has become a key event in the country’s cultural calendar. For Read more ...
james.woodall
The 2013 Golden Bear in Berlin has gone to Poziţia Copilului (Child's Pose), by Romanian director Călin Peter Netzer. Starring Luminita Gheorghiu as a mother, Cornelia, drumming up support for her son Barbu, arraigned for killing a little boy in a speeding offence, the Berlinale winner is a much-favoured mix of - in this festival - a film combining steely contemporaneity and political fearlessness. Its documentary-like texture and compelling theme, along with Gheorghiu's hugely imposing performance, make it a popular winner.A Silver Bear goes (as happily predicted by theartsdesk) to Paulina Read more ...
james.woodall
They’re in trouble. They had to be. Otherwise there’d be no drama. And if you’re a fan of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) skip the next two paragraphs to avoid knowing where, physically, temporally, Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) have arrived since the poetic ending of the 2004 film.Location: Greece. They’re together: unsurprising fact. They have twin girls. They’re on holiday in the Peloponnese, guests of an elderly writer called Patrick, played by Walter Lassally (a cinematographer who lives in Crete and, as it happens, won an Oscar for Zorba Read more ...
james.woodall
Great fun on day three in Berlin: Scarlett Johansson co-stars in a porn movie. Well, a movie about a young man’s love of porn sites, in which she flashes her famous curves - and starts sleeping with Jon Martello (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). But Jon, a swanky, body-building Roman Catholic, is soon dumped; Johansson’s Barbara Sugarman sees no future in being jilted by a laptop and tissues.Don John’s Addiction might on the surface seem a deeply tasteless excuse to cash in on raw sex and Johansson’s nakedness (kept, in fact, to a suggestive minimum), yet it’s much cleverer and wittier than it sounds. Read more ...
james.woodall
Ecology at the first full day of the Berlin film festival. An intriguing Matt Damon city-versus-country movie, Promised Land, puts fracking into the mainstream for the first time. Damon plays Steve Butler, an eager corporate buyer of leases in rural America to enable his New York employers Global to start deep drilling for massively lucrative natural gas.In a failing Pennsylvania small town Butler runs up against ancestral devotion to farming and an incomprehensible aversion to instant fortune, and into (of course) a pretty schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie De Witt). In her inherited home she’s Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Proving that laughter is the only sure-fire cure for the January blues, this year's London Comedy Film Festival took place over four days from Thursday 24th to Sunday 27th January. Known commonly and affectionately as LOCO, it once again showcased the best of comedy filmmaking from around the world, lined-up alongside a range of imaginative events - a programme seemingly designed to give the most depressing month of the year a well deserved kick up the arse.Giving the intriguing but daunting sounding "Laughter Yoga" a wide berth on Thursday morning, I opted instead for Thursday evening's BFI Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
LOCO London’s "four days of the world’s best funny films" is one of those about-time ideas, because London needs a great comedy film festival. As a warmup, this Saturday 1 December at 6pm, LOCO London and the Hackney Picturehouse are holding Woodystock, celebrating Woody Allen’s birthday with a big screen blow-out of Manhattan – one of Woody’s best. In this fest of all things Woody, there will be readings of Allen’s short stories, standup, jazz and Woody-inspired cocktails - although no one really knows what a Woody-inspired cocktail is, you'll be chasing lobsters in the kitchen by the time Read more ...